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Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries And Cultural Book History, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

Circulating library catalogs offer one of the most revealing views available of book publishing and reading in eighteenth-century Britain, since those catalogs and the libraries they document were put together by book traders whose livelihood depended upon giving an unprecedentedly wide range of British readers the books they wanted. Of course, the perspective on eighteenth-century British book culture provided by their catalogs is nowhere near as comprehensive as the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalog (ESTC) or the recently published first volume of The English Novel 1770– 1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (TEN), which “seeks …